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no stopping me. I swear that I had the biggest penis in all of France!
    Guy, the boss, took a shine to me. I was first in and last out, and I used to beg him to let memake the staff dinner. I wouldn’t take my half-day off during the week. I would come in and work for nothing.
    English customers would come, and Guy would say that they must be taken into the kitchen to meet me, his little British chef, because he knew how homesick, how isolated I was. He saw through my arrogance, my pushiness. I was like an orphan there, and he stepped in as a father-figure. People sometimes point out how, in shows like Kitchen Nightmares, I’ll always encourage the youngest chap in the kitchen. If you want to know why – Paris is why. I know how it feels to be in a corner, unnoticed and unloved.
    After I’d been in Guy’s kitchen for a year, I told him I wanted to move on. That was when he offered me a job as his Number Two. I was thrilled, but, as a Number Two, I would have to show other people what to do, and I wasn’t ready to finish my training so soon. So I went to the great Joël Robuchon, where – guess what? – I went straight back to being a humble commis.
    Joël’s restaurant, Robuchon , was the most famous restaurant in the world at the time. The kitchen was in a kind of corridor, and once you were installed there, you simply didn’t move for the next five hours. Joël made Marco look like apussycat. One evening, we had eight Japanese investors in: two wanted duck, two a meat course, and four fish. I’ll never forget it. The duck was cooked wrapped in pastry. So that would come out of the oven, and then you had two minutes before the other main courses all had to be ready. Timing was crucial.
    One of the fish I had to cook was hake. I had to wait until all the breadcrumbs were the same colour. Then I had to take it out and pipe on this butter. I was also doing John Dory and sea bass, all in two minutes, timing myself by a clock on the hearth.
    All of a sudden, Bernard, one of the French chefs, had fucked up. There was a problem with the pastry, and he was in such a rage that he slammed the oven door and the glass broke. A minute later, I saw this huge copper pan coming at us, the pan that the duck was supposed to be in. It turned out that the meat section had panicked and forgotten to put the duck in it. Someone had lifted the lid up and discovered this, and, well, I’ve never heard a scream like it. The guy had to start again from scratch. It was horrific, and if there had been a back door, I think we all would have bolted.
    Joël was such an unpleasant person to work for. On my last week, the fucker even put me onbin duty. You literally had to climb inside the bins on a Saturday morning and hose them down for about three hours. It was a terrible job.
    ‘But it’s my last day tomorrow,’ I said to Chef.
    ‘Look, you’ll be here tomorrow morning, cleaning those bins out, or you’ll never work in a Michelin-star restaurant again. I’ll ring every chef in France and make sure that you’re banned.’
    That night, I knew I wouldn’t get my money. I had worked the last month for nothing.
    After my stint at Robuchon , I knew I was good for nothing. Not for a while, anyway, because, physically, I was broken, but I couldn’t afford not to work. What I needed was a lucky break, a way of earning some cash and recharging my energy at the same time. That break came to me just in the nick of time. And this time, believe it or not, the money was good and the hours were human.

Chapter Five
Oceans Apart
    A guy came into the restaurant who had an agency near Nice that employed chefs to work on board the yachts of millionaires. A few days later, I sent them my CV. Within twenty-four hours, they contacted me and told me that they had a job for me on board a charter. The idea of what amounted to a working holiday sounded like just what the doctor ordered. So I headed down to the Med. My boat was captained by an absolute knob, but